Notes: "Citation Count" is the number of scholarly film articles indexed in JSTOR that cite a magazine. We collected this citation data using JSTOR's Data for Research platform. We searched for film-oriented magazines in the "references" section of the 13,866 articles from 15 journals that JSTOR categorizes as "Film Studies." We then disambiguated the data by checking the reference section of every match -- eliminating false positives (e.g. cutting Writing the Photoplay from the Photoplay search results) and eliminating articles that cited a magazine but focused on the post-1960 period (e.g. an article citing a 1998 report from Variety).

Magazine circulation data was collected from N.W. Ayer & Son's Newspaper Annuals, 1900 to 1960, at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Several editions of the Ayer Annuals are also available online at Hathi Trust.

Eric Hoyt is writing a journal article analyzing the circulation and citation data in much more depth. Derek Long is structuring the circulation data into a relational database, and the data will be available for other others to access and use by early-2014. In the meantime, keep playing with the visualization and see what trends you notice.